Writing Grants

Writing Grants of up to $1000 are available annually for ten to fifteen successful faculty applicants, depending upon amounts requested. These one-time only grants will provide aid to U.Va. faculty members facing the often difficult challenges of scholarly writing at any stages of their careers. Faculty members awarded a grant may apply it towards the following expenditures, among others, as long as they are acceptable in your discipline and department:

• hiring a writing coach to help you focus on your writing
• hiring an editor for light to moderate editing, proofreading or developmental editing
• hiring an editor or coach to help you improve your grant writing abilities and/or writing skill
• hiring a graduate student from your department to edit your work. Note: This has been particularly successful for former grant winners writing highly technical material and foreign nationals writing in English.

The Grants are intended to help with writing and writing-related issues rather than with the technicalities of manuscript preparation (e.g., subventions, indexing, transcription). PAW Writing Grants must be spent by May 1 of the academic year awarded and may not be used for summer salary.

Grant winners will take part in at least two lunchtime conversations during the year of their award to discuss their progress on their writing project and will submit by June 1 of that academic year a final report detailing their expenditures and progress on their writing project(s). The following, representative comments from Grant winners' end-of-year reports identify many benefits they received from the PAW Program:

• If it were not for this grant, I would have always considered hiring an editor a luxury that I cannot afford.  Now, I realize that it is a necessity that I cannot afford not to have.  It proved to be invaluable to my writing process. 
• This grant allowed me to establish a work schedule and deadlines throughout the year for my book project, which has always been on the “back burner” during the academic year in the past.
• This collaboration with my editor has resulted in improved effectiveness and efficiency in writing, especially with respect to increasing the accessibility of my ideas to potential grant reviewers by overcoming a self-centered perspective and evaluating the use of technical descriptions.
• [My editor’s] cheerful and pragmatic attitude is helping me make the transition from the all-or-nothing, anxiety-ridden graduate student writing methods to a more professional way of writing, in which it is normal to correct and rewrite successive drafts.
• Working with my editor was instrumental in me winning an NSF grant for $411,000.  That is quite a payoff from a $1,000 investment!

A complete application consists of these three parts:

1. The completed on-line form (click to download) submitted electronically or by mail
   
2. Your curriculum vitae
   
3. A letter or email of support (click to download template) from your department or program chair. This letter should both support your application and approve your proposed use of the grant money as appropriate to scholarly work in your discipline.

Selection Criteria:

To be competitive, a proposal must…

• propose a well-thought out, feasible and reasonable plan, explaining how the Grant will be used, in as much detail as possible.
  
• make a persuasive case for why the Grant will help the applicant complete or make significant progress on a written project
• explain why this Grant is important to you at this point in your career
  
• include a compelling support letter from the chair that speaks both to the appropriateness of the applicant's proposal within his/her scholarly field and to the possible effects the grant will have on the applicant's scholarly productivity.

Submit electronic applications to: trc-paw@virginia.edu
Or, send paper applications by mail to:

Professors as Writers
Teaching Resource Center
University of Virginia
P.O. Box 400136
Hotel D, 24 East Range
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4136